Published in 1963, containing two letters from Baldwin that speak to racism today as well as they did during the modern Civil Rights Movement.

“The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed the collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors, that American men are the world's most direct and virile, that American women are pure. Negroes know far more about white Americans than that; it can almost be said, in fact, that they know about white Americans what parents—or, anyway, mothers—know about their children, and that they very often regard white Americans that way. And perhaps this attitude, held in spite of what they know and have endured, helps to explain why Negroes, on the whole, and until lately, have allowed themselves to feel so little hatred. The tendency has really been, insofar as this was possible, to dismiss white people as the slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing.”

An essay collection from 1976-1984 exploring identity and intersecting oppression.

"Anger is an appropriate reaction to racist attitudes, as is fury when the actions arising from those attitudes do not change. To those women here who fear the anger of women of Color more than their own unscrutinized racist attitudes, I ask: Is the anger of women of Color more threatening than the woman-hatred that tinges all aspects of our lives?"

A personal narrative that helps readers understand there is no "not racist"--we must either be actively challenging white supremacy in its cultural and institutional manifestations, or the default is to be racist, to allow and participate in white supremacy.

Targeting younger readers, and accessible for folks who are interested in learning, but may need a more succinct version of Kendi's opus, Stamped from the Beginning: A Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America.

From 2018, Oluo weaves personal stories and experiences with lessons about racism in the US, in an accessible and conversational style.

Published in 1980, Zinn offered a retelling of our favorite national moments, elevating the perspective of those with less power, the marginalized, and populations at whose expense the mainstream story of expansion, exceptionalism, progress, and triumph came.

While Zinn's bottom up survey of US history is mostly told through the lens of class division, Takaki retells our history in a way that centers the experience of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. From 1993.

Another book in the vein of Zinn and Takaki, Loewen revisits myths held in mainstream curriculum and imagination of US history with primary sources and documentation that offer a more inclusive and reality-based narrative of the past. From 1996.

Published in 2010, legal scholar and former litigator delineates how the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control, an extension from slavery and Jim Crow racism.

“In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don’t. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color “criminals” and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind. Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.”

An inspiring and moving memoir from 2014, based on Stevenson's work as a civil rights attorney who founded Equal Justice Initiative.

“Finally, I've come to believe that the true measure of our commitment to justice, the character of our society, our commitment to the rule of law, fairness, and equality cannot be measured by how we treat the rich, the powerful, the privileged, and the respected among us. The true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned. We are all implicated when we allow other people to be mistreated.”

Kelley chronicles and explores visions of change in Black history.

“Too often, our standards for evaluating social movements pivot around whether or not they "succeeded" in realizing their visions rather than on the merits or power of the visions themselves. By such a measure, virtually every radical movement failed because the basic power relations they sought to change remained pretty much intact. And yet it is precisely these alternative visions and dreams that inspire new generations to struggle for change.”

Cultural history of racial formation in the South.

“Central to the meaning of whiteness is a broad, collective American silence. The denial of white as a racial identity, the denial that whiteness has a history, allows the quiet, the blankness, to stand as the norm. This erasure enables many to fuse their absence of racial being with the nation, making whiteness their unspoken but deepest sense of what it means to be an American. And despite, and paradoxically because of, their treasured and cultivated distinctiveness, southern whites are central to this nationalism of denial.”

Explores the way racial hierarchy and a clinging to the power afforded to whiteness contributes to white folks continuing to elect politicians who enact policies that make us poorer, sicker, less safe, and less educated.

“It's a narrative about how "whiteness" becomes a formation worth living and dying for, and how, in myriad ways and on multiple levels, white Americans bet their lives on particular sets of meanings associated with whiteness, even in the face of clear threats to mortality or to common sense.”

Critical essays that interrogate representations of blackness in contemporary culture.

“...consider the possibility that to love blackness is dangerous in a white supremacist culture- so threatening, so serious a breach in the fabric of the social order, that death is the punishment.”

Devastating history of medical racism and a critical analysis of the effects of institutionalized discrimination on Black people and their public health.

Essential research about how adverse childhood experiences impact physical health outcomes. Relevant because in addition to abuse, neglect, family separation that can affect all children, some children are more susceptible due to the toxic stress of racism.

"A rousing wake-up call . . . this highly engaging, provocative book prove[s] beyond a reasonable doubt that millions of lives depend on us finally coming to terms with the long-term consequences of childhood adversity and toxic stress.” — Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow

Pulitzer Prize-winning Wilkerson chronicles the Great Migration through gripping intimate and personal narratives of several families who made the risky trek from Jim Crow South to the promise of creating new lives in the North and West, uncovering the wins, and challenges of facing a different kind of racism in northern cities and in the West.

Glaude's memoir-manifesto on remaking democracy from the ground up.

“James Baldwin’s words haunt: “People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.” Are we a nation of monsters?”

Explores how the protective energy of anger can help liberate and heal us from racism, writing from a Buddhist perspective.

“My experience is that most white folks aren’t interested in my anger, because they are not interested in the violence of their whiteness. Their disinterest in their whiteness, along with the unbearable suspicion that their whiteness has had and continues to have a brutal impact on black and brown folks, creates a tension from which their own rage emerges, which is often directed back at black and brown folks.”

How white people's defensiveness about race prevents progress and protects white supremacy.

*Written by a white woman who caters to the perceived "sensitivity" of white people, Diangelo is not without her critics from Black activists. This book seems to be an easy entry point for many to start to listen and drop their defensiveness, which is in and of itself, an aspect of white supremacy culture--trusting white voices over Black ones who've been saying the same thing.

**A note that, this reviewer believes "fragility" is a misnomer and, as some Black educators have noted, the book could more accurately be called White Hostility. The term "white fragility" feeds into old caricatures and stereotypes of how Black women were gendered in contrast to white women that allowed racist policy and justified violence. White folks often display a powerful and violent impulse to assert power, which is not something fragile, delicate, and easily broken. Our defensiveness is a kind of hostility and rage, not a dainty and “don’t hurt me” kind of self-protection implied by the term "fragility." Since Black women were historically stereotyped as the “Mammy,” and now are often seen as “strong” or “fierce,” and generally embodying the opposite of white womanhood, in contrast, depicted as "fragile" and in need of saving from Black men, who were described as a threat (from A Birth of a Nation to politicians' warnings of Willie Horton to present day justifications of police killings). This imaginary white fragility justified the killing of Black men to protect white women. I think we can take in her points, but need to be aware of how we or other white people talking about race might unintentionally feed into those images and narratives even while trying to call out a problematic behavior.

Therapist Resmaa Menakem discusses the psychological damage of racial trauma through the lens of a somatic or body-oriented understanding of mental health, that seeks to understand and heal the ways we learn to hold white supremacy in our bodies.

“A key factor in the perpetuation of white-body supremacy is many people’s refusal to experience clean pain around the myth of race. Instead, usually out of fear, they choose the dirty pain of silence and avoidance and, invariably, prolong the pain.”

Conversations about racism and justice in Amercian Buddhism.

“We simply cannot engage with either the ills or promises of society if we continue to turn a blind eye to the egregious and willful ignorance that enables us to still not “get it” in so many ways. It is by no means our making, but given the culture we are emerging from and immersed in, we are responsible. White folks’ particular reluctance to acknowledge impact as a collective while continuing to benefit from the construct of the collective leaves a wound intact without a dressing. The air needed to breathe through forgiveness is smothered. Healing is suspended for all. Truth is necessary for reconciliation."

From 1990, a review and exploration of black womanist and feminist cultural and intellectual history.

Reflections on the Combahee River Collective--from its founders and contemporary Black feminists.

“If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.”

An impressive anthology of fiction, autobiography, poetry, letters, journalism, songs, court decisions, documents, and manifestos, and more, that exhibits the Black experience in the US.

Written as a letter to his teenage son, Coates tells his own stories of encountering racism, and grappling with what it is like to inhabit a Black body in a society whose racial ideas have violent impacts.

“But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.”

Love brings an abolitionist and antiracist framework to her field of expertise: public education. This book is an indictment of our education system as an industry that profits from the suffering of BIPOC children. Love makes a persuasive case for why reforms have not and will not work, and how to envision educational freedom and justice.

Legendary activist and scholar, Angela Davis' 1983 classic that uncovers the alliances that compromised the women's movement ability to be inclusive and effective. Davis helps readers to see the ways in which white feminism has mimicked the race and class biases of the dominant patriarchal culture.

“Woman” was the test, but not every woman seemed to qualify. Black women, of course, were virtually invisible within the protracted campaign for woman suffrage."

Kendall's book highlights issues that are often overlooked in mainstream feminism: poverty, hunger, gun violence, murder, education, violence against trans women. Hood Feminism asserts that the pussy-hat wearing feminists attend to issues that affect middle-upper class white women at the exclusion of issues that disproportionately impact women of color and Black women: the essential necessities in life. Kendall names issues of equal pay, women in CEO positions, women in the media as important but of a limited scope. A more expansive feminism will address the broader community of women needing food, shelter, safety from gun violence, sexual violence and police brutality. 

A succinct primer on queer, Black feminist theory and practice. An honest and hopeful look at where we are now, and where strong movements and smart organizing can take us.

From the 1940s, Williams' book explores the integral role slavery had on economic development and the Industrial Revolution. Focused on a British context, but relevant to North America, as well.